Tag Archives: organized religion

“YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH ORGANIZATION”

Dan is writing a book and one of his chapters is about organized religion and why he believes churches need to be organized in a healthy way. Dan realizes that the phrase “organized religion” conjures up a lot of negative vibes and he wants to take that into account. Go by and read some of the responses and add your own thoughts…but not before you take a moment to answer my question at the end of this post.

When I hear the phrase “organized religion” I think of things like: the church caring more about numbers than individuals, more about being entertained than following Christ, worship being centered around “the sermon” rather than around God, people who are sure they have it all figured out, people who are mostly concerned with developing and maintaining their organization rather than being mostly concerned about loving and caring for others, people who are against a lot of stuff, people who want justice for their organization and the people within it but aren’t that concerned with justice for those outside of their organization, big buildings, lots of programs….I could go on but you get the picture.

Of course I don’t think that organization itself is bad, but it does seem that we have a tendency to go awry when it comes to organizing the church/religion. It seems almost impossible for us to stop ourselves from getting so caught up in “being a successful organization” that we can’t be good followers of Christ.

Maybe our critics are saying to us in their best Col. Jessup voice: YOU CAN’T HANDLE ORGANIZATION!!!!!!!

So my question to you is this: Does organizing religion defeat the purpose?